Who We Are

Wall after wall, pushback after pushback, fortress Europe has never been more hostile to freedom of movement. The border system is responsible for an unspeakable amount of suffering and violence, often peaking into death. It is constituted by a lavishly expensive infrastructure used for brutal surveillance at every border: fast boats gifted by Europe to Lybian militia, drones by Frontex man-hunting forest areas, scanners, sound cannons, fences, walls, an army of police and other military grade equipment. Though, the border system is more than that, it is also a mind-set that has snaked itself into our heads and hearts to justify violence and make it invisible: passports, papers, visas create a logical framework that logically extends into deportations, pushbacks, externalized lagers and internal borders. The list goes on and on, long and enraging.

 

All of this is visible in each and every border area, and dramatically evident in the Central Mediterranean Sea. Still a key artery for migration, it has been turned into an open graveyard since a long time. Here, efforts to rescue people in distress are criminalized and obstructed, Lybian militias are armed and called “coastguard”, coastal governments refuse to coordinate rescue efforts. The normalization of this space has turned thousands of deaths into numbers, cumulating year after year.

 

They managed to let us believe that this system is the only possible, realistic, serious one, and any alternative vision is either utopic or dangerous. Dangerous for whom? – we could ask. We refuse the idea that the world where we live is normal and we want to project a radically different political horizon to build another present.

And we cannot fail to remember that in September 2015 people on the move showed us how to defy borders, how to turn freedom of movement from concept to practice. Their long March of Hope, from the closed borders of Hungary, through highways, forced structurally racist European states to open their internal borders. They proved that collective, coordinated, direct action can break the cycle of normalized violence.

 

That was 10 years ago. Some anniversaries should not go down without noise.

 

F.LOTTA has two main objectives. The first one, linked to the space it occupies, the central Mediterranean Sea, aims for immediate change. The other is to project a radical political horizon, to push the realm of possibilities and alternatives.

 

In the central Mediterranean Sea, fortress Europe has successfully managed to discipline rescue associations into a tight operational framework and to normalize the presence of preventable deaths. Day in and day out, rescue associations live under the constant scrutiny of an authority that, instead of supporting their rescue efforts, blackmails them with far away ports of disembarkation, fines, detentions and more. The efforts of fortress Europe to remove from the central Med witnesses and rescue assets have been coupled with filling the sea with Lybian militias chasing people on the move. F.LOTTA occupies this space, re-politicising the central Med and, through its own presence, contending the narrative and practices of fortress Europe.

 

It is not only about the central Mediterranean Sea. Geographically, we know that people suffer and die from the racist border regime everywhere else at border areas, and that the border is both inside European states  and it has been exported and externalized. We see that the walls that fortress Europe has erected all around itself are made with barbed wire and cement, as much as with capitalism, patriarchy, colonialism and racism. We understand that the fight for freedom of movement can only be intersectional with other fights. Our aim is to dismantle those walls brick by brick, projecting a radically different, intersectional vision for an alternative present. In this asphyxiating reality where we live, we want to breathe oxygen.